&quot;Get ready to rethink how you operate your business. The book:The Two-Second Advantageputs forth a simple but powerful notion that organizations don&apos;t need to have a vision of the future ten years or even ten days out, they only need a little bit of the right information in the right context just far enough ahead to see an opening or opportunity an instant before the competition.&quot;

Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama WinFrom the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign” So they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama’s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. Example: they sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity.The “scientists” created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data.http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2C2LOt7em

Social media can help auto manufacturers find vehicle defects&quot;Researchers developed a computer-based information system that provides auto manufacturers an efficient way to discover and classify vehicle defects.&quot;&quot;It is, however, a daunting challenge for firms to process the &quot;unstructured and dynamic&quot; content of social media in order to detect the useful nuggets on vehicle defects that are buried among millions of unrelated or immaterial posts.&quot;&quot;Vehicle quality management professionals would greatly benefit in terms of productivity by employing a vehicle defect discovery systemhttp://phys.org/news/2012-10-social-media-auto-vehicle-defects.html

FSA fines Bank of Scotland&quot;FSA has fined Bank of Scotland £4.2 million for failures in its systems, leaving the bank with inaccurate mortgage records for 250,000 customers...&quot;&quot;This breach is particularly serious because the inaccuracies built up over a period of seven years. There was no structure in place to identify errors as they occurred and no checking procedures thereafter.&quot;&quot;In a complicated organisationwhere several legacy systems exist, firms have to make sure they are synchronised, otherwise it is their customers who suffer.&quot;http://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/fsa-fines-bank-of-scotland-4-2-million-for-record-failings/a627794

Roche may face fines over drug reportingRoche being investigated for failing to properly disclose drug side effects found in tens of thousands of reports - facing fines of up to $13.8 billion...&quot;Roche said it was going through all the cases to check which incidents should have beenclassified as possible adverse reactions...&quot;&quot;Roche said it was going through all the cases to check which incidents should have been classified as possible adverse reactions...&quot;&quot;...a routine inspection by British investigators found it [Roche] had failed to fully assess up to 80,000 cases of possible adverse drug reactions. There were some 15,000 deaths among the reports, which may have been due to natural disease progression but may have been connected to the drugs.&quot;http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/23/us-roche-europe-idUSBRE89M0KN20121023

IRS and SEC detect fraud patterns in heaps of data&quot;Using digital forensic analysis and data visualization, a fraud or insider trading case that once took 14-17 months to analyze can now be done in minutes&quot;John Russack, Northrop Grumman’s director of intelligence community strategies - “The technology improves every day, and so does our ability to handle it. We get more data and it’s more accurate, but the analyst can be overwhelmed,” which is why analytics are needed to “balance the effort to get the predictive analysis we need.”&quot;Jodi Patterson, the IRS’ first director of return integrity and correspondence services, said the combination of fraud detection through data filters, business rules and follow-up inquiries by people has saved $19 billion in unmerited refunds&quot;http://www.govexec.com/technology/2012/10/irs-and-sec-detect-fraud-patterns-heaps-data/58816/

Digital Staffing: The Future of Recruitment-by-Algorithm&quot;Big Data can provide the best answer to the big questions in talent identification, if we ask the right questions of the data&quot;&quot;Data integration - combining people&apos;s multiple profiles into one - is the next step, and it&apos;s already happening.&quot;http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/digital_staffing_the_future_of.html

Complex IT Environment Multiple ECM and bespoke applications Duplicate capabilitiesNew systems, including the cloud being brought onboardIT and the organization must bear the cost of maintenance, supportCreates information silos – typically of unmanaged informationDecreases agility